Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Who Targets Me - Track which entities are targeting you with adverts

This project is something to adopt in another countries..
Israel can be one of them.

"During the 2015 general election and 2016 referendum, campaigns spent millions of pounds purchasing highly targeted Facebook adverts. Voters were bombarded with messages tailored to their interests, location, age, gender and more. For the good of our democracy, it's time to throw some light on dark ads."

In the run-up to the general election, the Bureau is investigating how
political parties and groups are using targeted advertising on Facebook
to try to influence votes.

There has been a huge rise in political advertising on social media,
which offers a much bigger audience for a much cheaper price than ads in
newspapers or on billboards. A quarter of the last general election's
total advertising spend was on Facebook, and social media is thought to
have played a significant role in the victories of Donald Trump and the
Vote Leave campaign.

The reams of personal information held by Facebook on its users means
messages can be individually tailored for people with particular
interests, who care about certain issues, or who live in marginal
constituencies. The problem is that this type of advertising is in large
part not subject to public scrutiny. Only Facebook knows what users are
being shown what adverts - and privacy obligations combined with
commercial interests mean that information is not publicly accessible.

A new project called Who Targets Me is
attempting to address this, by recruiting social media users to share
information on what adverts they are seeing. The Bureau’s new data
journalism team the Bureau Local will analyze the data collected in an attempt to shed light on an opaque and rapidly growing industry.

The more people who get involved, the more detail we'll get about the
scale and detail of the targeted messaging being used. Help us by
signing up here - and read our story introducing the project and outlining our initial findings"